Résumé
There are almost 99,000 homecare nurses in France, yet this population has been scarcely studied by scholars in Humanities and Social Sciences, thus a major part of their work remains invisible. To explore the social interactions of homecare nurses, we have chosen to use a everyday object: the smartphone. This hybrid object has colonised our lives, with almost 87% of French people owning one. It has become the gateway to communication. The smartphone is an amplifier of signals and skills. It is also an artefact that changes the nature of the tasks performed by humans. In this study, we will look more closely at the characteristics of homecare nurses, their history, how they differ from hospital nurses, but above all we will explore what the mobile phone reveals about their work. How do they use the smartphone ? Does this cognitive artefact change their relationship with time, their daily routine and their interactions with patients and other carers ? Using ethnological observations of nursing rounds, sociological interviews and social network surveys, the grounded theory method has enabled us to discover certain aspects of private practice nursing. Using an interactionist approach, we will look at the relationships between private practice nurses and patients and other homecare providers through the prism of the smartphone. The smartphone raises the question of how manners in first contact and how the entire healthcare relationship are changing. Self-presentation changes when it passes through the written filter of a text message or e-mail. It is deprived of its non-verbal attributes, but enriched with new functionalities such as emoticons and traceability of exchanges. The smartphone also reveals the values and power issues underlying the selection of patients by private practice nurses when making appointments. Power relations between professionals are also revealed by this technological tool. It does not change the nature of professional relationships, but it does offer new opportunities for communication that the players seize to negotiate the boundaries of their respective territories. By making it possible to be reached at any time and in any place, this artefact has blurred the traditional separations between professional and personal time. The smartphone allows the many demands of the outside world to slip in home care nurse lives and into patients’ homes. They are torn between their different public and private roles. We will look at the tactics put in place by nurses to resolve this issue.We will then focus on handovers, which are an important part of nurses' secondary socialisation. There is a wide variety of ways in which they communicate, with private practice nurses using the various communication channels offered to them by this new player, the smartphone. By mixing written functions, spoken messages, emoticons and images, the smartphone is part of the Jack Goody’s graphic reason. Finally, we will look at the use of the Internet, including the YouTube platform, to acquire and update nursing knowledge. This new mode of learning is subtly associated with the tradition of oral dissemination of knowledge among nurses.